Lesson 12 - Introduction to INQUIRY, INVESTIGATION, AND SCIENTIFIC THINKING

Intentional curiosity and tools to pursue questions are some of the building blocks of inquiry. Scientific investigation activities build students’ skills in asking varied questions and offer some approaches for dancing with the questions they ask. These practices translate directly to the journal page and will deepen the investigations students make and the understandings they come to.
We can train ourselves to be more curious and to discover more mysteries wherever we look. In this section, we offer “curiosity scaffolds for students to help them ask richer and more varied questions. We focus on asking the questions and coming up with plausible explanations, not immediately knowing the answers. Students have permission to be curious, be wrong, make mistakes and change their minds, all in the name of science.